Most crashes are two moving things that should not have met. A flooded crossing is one moving thing that should have stopped: a car, a barricade, and a few inches of water that looked shallower and slower than it was.
The water. It takes less than drivers think. Six inches reaches the bottom of most passenger cars and can cause loss of control and stalling, a foot of water will float many vehicles, and two feet of rushing water can carry away most vehicles, SUVs and pickups included (National Weather Service). Nearly half of all flash-flood deaths are vehicle related (NOAA). This week a flood watch covered Houston, Sugar Land and The Woodlands (KPRC).
What the pattern says. A car holds the road because its weight presses the tires into the pavement. Rising water takes that away from below. A car is a sealed-enough box, the water pushes up on it, and every inch of lift is weight the tires no longer press down, so the grip goes before the car ever floats. Moving water also pushes sideways, and the faster it runs, the harder it pushes. By the time a driver feels the car go light, turning around is already behind him. That is why the barricade is there. It does at a low-water crossing what a gate does at a railroad crossing, which is what The Grade Crossing and Ungated are about: it takes the judgment out of the driver’s hands.
What the law does with it. Two questions, not one. Driving around a barricade is an offense in Texas, and a Class B misdemeanor when the barricade is there because water is over the road (Transportation Code Section 472.022). That is the driver’s own conduct, and a jury weighs it. It does not end the case by itself. A claimant recovers unless his share of responsibility is greater than half (Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 33.001), which is what Comparative Fault is about, and the people carried off are often passengers who made no choice at all. The second question is the warning. Texas shields a government’s discretionary decision about whether to put up a warning device in the first place, but not a missing or broken one it was told about and did not fix within a reasonable time (Section 101.060). Those claims run on their own clock: notice to the government within six months, and a city’s charter can set its own deadline (Section 101.101). Limitations explains why that clock has ended many otherwise good claims against a city.
No one is named here, and nothing on this page decides a particular crash. Water over a road is decided twice: by the driver who went in, and by whoever was responsible for the warning that should have stopped the car.
Dispatch is the Night Docket’s news strand: what happened on Texas roads and in Texas courts, reported from credible outlets and agency releases, with no names and no conclusions about open investigations, then connected to the entries that explain the science and the law. General information, not legal advice.
